2011-12-28

Well, Lulu is having another sale. 35% off today only (and yesterday too, but they're not real timely about sending me their coupon codes). Use BLIZZARDS305 at checkout.

So, this means they are losing money on every PDF purchase, since their royalty is only 20% usually, and is currently 10% til mid-January, and the base fee charged is on each PDF sale is just 99 cents. The authors (namely, moi) don't see any price changes on these sales, so Lulu is eating all that. They must have some hefty markups on the base cost for print books for these sales to be remotely profitable, because print royalties are also 20%.

How does this make any business sense? No idea. I'm guessing PDF sales are a very tiny part of their business and they just ignore the losses.

2011-12-24

Isaiah 9:6 "For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace."

2011-12-18

Having contributed to a bunch of community efforts, one has finally born fruit - I've got an adventure published in Fight On! #13. So go buy that bad boy! You can get it here on Lulu: Fight On! #13

The adventure is called "Fruiting Towers", it was the result of an "art first" thread on the ODD forums. If anyone ends up running it, drop me a line, I love hearing how I've killed other people's players... I mean, "challenged" other people's players...

2011-12-08

Tavis (of Mule Abides) runs a Red Box New York gaming group, and he's got his players running through the Anomalous Subsurface Environment, among other things. He's managed to somehow crank the gonzo up several notches higher with his changes, so good on him!

Yeah I know these "Lulu sales" posts are boring, but if you haven't actually purchased from Lulu before, you won't know about the codes. Lulu says this is their last sale, for whatever that's worth. 25% off until December 14th, enter coupon code COUNTDOWN305 at check out. Remember, it all goes to support Village2Village until the 25th, so buy buy buy! Or just donate to V2V directly, it's all good!

2011-12-06

Lulu must be getting desperate... there's yet another 30% off sale. Use coupon WINTERSAVE305 at checkout, it's good through Wednesday Dec 7th. This does NOT reduce how much goes to charity, Lulu eats the discount themselves.

2011-12-02

So that was a decent session. I had Gutboy's player roll the percentile dice to decide his face at the ungentle hands of Dr. Giggles - he chose to do a d30 roll instead, and was lucky, I had loaded all the "good" outcomes into the lower percentage range. Not as lucky as he could have been - Dr. Giggles didn't manage to find any solid gold organs mysteriously implanted into Gutboy during the operation.

So Gutboy lived. I was kind of sad about that, I was hoping somebody would roll up a geisha or an equally bizarre class. But, they are almost completely broke now, and have no way to pay for equipment for new henchmen.

It was amazing how fast Gutboy's mind turned to banditry and murder. Every NPC they met was a potential victim being sized up. Mongo and Netal were a bit more restrained, until Netal saw the farmer with a shotgun. Netal's player has seen my firearms damage chart, and has been angling to get a shotgun, which I cruelly and arbitrarily said were restricted items, and nobody would sell him one. I'd since forgotten about that, but Netal's player hadn't - once he saw the shotgun, all thoughts of finding missing NPC's and collecting rewards disappeared. The shotgun was all that mattered. Not the best conceived plan, but a double-barreled shotgun is a pretty formidable weapon as I wrote up - unload both barrels for 1d12, with +2 to hit at close range. Of course if they head back to Louisburgh to follow up on that missing person quest, there's going to be consequences.

Netal's big plan was to gather some coin to buy an army of pit-fighter slaves to do his dirty work. The violent abolitionists had been brought up before, but I decided to make them target Netal - there's a reason the slavers wear masks in this city. He's been a bit too open with his slave-buying-and-getting-them-killed ways. Now brain-extracting abolitionists have got his number.

I've also changed the book from "constant temptation" to "implacable villain". It's not my goal to tempt players into being naughty, they're bloodthirsty enough without encouragement, so the book's now firmly in the cartoonish supervillain camp. Through the medium of Janet of 70's sitcom Three's Company. I really didn't intend for sitcom characters to become villains when I started this campaign... the players are so inured to my idiocy now that they don't even blink when this stuff happens.

2011-12-01

All proceeds from sales of Anomalous Subsurface Environment will be going to charity from Dec 1st thru December 25th. So if you haven't bought a copy, here's your chance to indulge in some gonzo while doing a good deed!

Lulu keeps their cut, of course, but I'll be donating all my revenues during this period to Village2Village. They are an awesome charity helping out the folks in Uganda.

Here's a brief video about two of the children they're helping, Sam & Esther: